We Are The Nerds tells the story of the famous Reddit website. It revolves around the lives of Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz, and some of the early employees. The book details events around Reddit history between 2005 and 2017 and talks about Reddit’s early days at YCombinator, its sale to Conde Nast, competition with Digg, as well as CEO transitions between Yishan Wang, Ellen Pao and back to Steve Huffman.

If you’re a fan of Reddit, or interested in the history of internet companies, this book would be for you!

I had no idea who Ryan Serhant was until coming across his talk at Google. He’s a real estate broker in New York that was featured on TV. In the book, he tells his story of coming to New York and his journey in the last 10 years building his real estate business and lessons learned on how to be a good salesman.

I found the book intrigueging because sales is a subject I’m not very familiar with. Some ideas he talks about are:

• Find your anchor – what do you want to avoid that will force you to succeed
• Go to an improv class – it will force you to listen as a salesman
• Say yes and find a way to make it happen in business
• Energy is infectious in relationships

Two take aways from his story were:

• Building systems or teams: I liked how he started as a broker and after learning the job, he focused his efforts on trying to building a team of brokers and scale his business.
• It’s interesting that he created himself a bigger purpose – teaching others how to sell better – instead of just focusing on real estate.

Overall, interesting book with lots of stories, it’s well organized – almost like a textbook. I’d recommend reading it if you’re interested in sales as a profession!